health

MIA: "We're all watching starving people."

Giuliana Rancic at this year’s Oscars.

 

 

 

 

By MIA FREEDMAN

Now that awards season is over, I’d like to point something out. The world has gone batshit crazy.

Hasn’t it?

How else can you explain the fact that actresses have been swallowed up by the fashion industry so that they now have to be size 0 and starve themselves each time they step onto a red carpet?

And so do the women who interview the stars on the red carpet for the acres of TV coverage. We know this because they tell us how hungry they are. How they haven’t eaten so they can fit into their $200,000 gowns.

E! News anchor and Fashion Police co-host Giuliana Rancic – who is a breast cancer survivor – unintentionally gave an insight into what it takes to remain so incredibly thin in an interview just after the Oscars. Answering a question about her relationship with husband Bill Rancic, she raved about how considerate he was:

“I had Oscars and then Fashion Police, and now I’m done. Awards season is over. So last night Bill surprised me. He had Chicago deep dish pizza flown in from Giordano’s!,” the reality star told Us magazine. “He knows after awards season, I go to town! We had that and some frozen yogurt for dessert and…walked around Santa Monica. It was sweet!”

Frozen yoghurt! Pizza! Imagine eating that!
“I go to town!” she said, referring to the fact that such food is forbidden while she’s under the scrutiny of TV cameras.
And she’s not even one of the actresses.
Click through the gallery for actresses throughout awards season. 
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In a recent blog post after the Oscars, UK journalist Rachel Tarley wrote of the awards show:
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Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars

“Millions of people around the world – many of them young girls – are watching the action at the world’s longest mutual congratulation session unfold on their TV screens.

They’re watching for the gowns, the jewellery, the hair and make-up. As an added bonus, they get protruding collar bones, razor-sharp shoulder blades and withered arms. If they listen carefully enough, there are even barely disguised tips on how to achieve the elegant Holocaust-chic style.

Early on in the red carpet fanfare at last night’s Oscars, the universally adored (and formerly ‘curvy’) Jennifer Lawrence broke off an interview to ask: ‘Is there food here?’ before explaining that she was ‘starving’ because she hadn’t had time to eat all day.

Jennifer, who suffered from pneumonia earlier this year, could well have been a specific target of Oscars host Seth Macfarlane’s joke about the pre-red carpet Hollywood diet.

‘And those of you who gave yourselves the flu two weeks ago to “get there”? It paid off,’ he quipped, to a murmur of uncomfortable laughter.

Another actress, Zoe Saldana, neatly side-stepped direct questions about her dietary preparations for the red carpet, insisting her method of weight control was “hydration”.

As in, not eating solid food?

Right.

This is less than a week after former Australian Vogue editor Kirstie Clements admitted that many of the models appearing in glossy magazines and on catwalks and ad campaigns are, literally, starving.

Some eat tissues to ‘trick’ their stomachs into feeling full. Others eat so little they faint throughout the day. One model she worked with ate nothing for days and gazed longingly as the rest of the crew had meals. By the end of the week long shoot, she’d became so weak, she couldn’t stand up. So the magazine shot her lying down.

Another girl who was employed as a ‘fit’ model (that means the designer uses her as his standard body shape and size and makes all his garments based on her proportions) had to regularly be admitted to hospital and put on a drip because she was so emaciated and dehydrated. And that was the state her job required her to be. Because that was the size he wanted to make and show his clothes.

And now that actresses have replaced models  in fashion advertising campaigns and now that red carpets have become the new catwalks, the fashion industry has swallowed Hollywood, demanding that actresses be model size so they can best show off the designer clothes they are expected to wear every time they have to promote their latest project or attend an awards show or premiere.

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Rachel Tarley again:

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosting the Golden Globes

Clearly, it’s not madness to be naturally thin or to go on a sensible eating plan in order to shift some surplus pounds. But it is madness that the already skeletal A-listers of Hollywood have been working their backsides off since Christmas to achieve the consumption sufferer-esque look we saw many of them modelling last night.

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler alluded to the aforementioned bonkersness in their opening monologue at this year’s Golden Globes.

‘The Hunger Games was one of the biggest films of the year, and also what I call the six weeks it took me to get into this dress,’ said Fey, before Poehler added: ‘Ang Lee’s been nominated for Best Director for Life of Pi, which is what I’m going to call the six weeks after I take this dress off!’

Let’s play pretend.

Let’s pretend that in order to be a successful model or actress, you had to have only one arm. In some very rare cases, these women were born that way and were ‘naturally’ one armless. But for the other 98% of models and actresses who wanted to reach the top of their profession, they have to have one of their arms surgically removed.

Because that’s what the photographers and the designers and the fashion editors wanted. That’s the aesthetic they thought best showed off the clothes.

Do you think anyone would question that? Do you think anyone would say: Hang on, if we have a system that requires women to do drastic, unnatural and unhealthy things to be considered successful or even employable, then isn’t our system MESSED UP AND IN URGENT NEED OF CHANGE?

But nobody does that. We all just continue to go along with this charade that famous women are all naturally thin and that models and actresses are all healthy and that it’s all just pretty clothes and glamour! and escapism!

Except we’re all watching starving people.

And nobody will say it.

Click through the gallery for other actresses who have starred in modelling campaigns – and faced the associated pressures. 

So what’s it going to take?